Author, musician, lifelong activist and former Black Panther Party Chair Elaine Brown gave Pittsburgh a taste of her revolutionary rhetoric as she recently visited her old comrade Rashad Byrdsong and made presentations at his Community Empowerment Association and at the University of Pittsburgh.
Brown made it clear that she is still about revolution and that she has no time for posers, as she said last year when she said Black Lives Matter had a “plantation mentality.” She likewise has no patience with the New Black Panther Party. For her, it comes down to the difference between talk and action.
“There is a single agenda and that agenda is revolution. We started with an ideology. What are you gonna do–talk about housing, that somehow it will magically happen? What we did happened because we did work,” she said during a question and answer session following her Pitt presentation.
“People really liked the Party when we put guns in the street—now there’s something you can do. You want to put some guns in the streets that will get people who will hear you. If you’re not willing to do that then let’s just talk about nothing.”
In California, in the 1960s, Brown said the Panthers found a way to get things that needed to be done—most of the time with no money or resources.
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